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SparkPeople

A few weeks back I switched from logging everything in FitDay.com to logging everything in SparkPeople.com. Boy. What a change.

Since February 2006 I have logged almost everyday into my FitDay – I had all my custom foods set up and knew my way around the site backwards and forwards. And then a few weeks ago someone showed me SparkPeople. I immediately liked it better then fitday because it broke my food down into breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks – it also has the fun water glass. I always grouped my meals in fitday by meals so what a pain it was if I ate something else or changed what I ate (I usually pre-enter my day) because then I would have to redo the whole day.

So far I really like SparkPeople, I got over the fact that I had to re-enter all my custom foods and that they site does have a few extra steps involved in adding, removing and editing food. Their site is much larger and I can do so much more with it – like track goals, chat in groups, read articles and more. One thing I can’t seem to get over is some of their food and how you add it to your day (ie. servings/how much you ate).

Here is a question for you, who measures their sour cream by grams? Anyone? I dunno about you guys but taking the sour cream from the container, putting it on the sale to weigh in and then onto my potato sucks big time! Okay, so I won’t be doing that – but does it make too much sense to add measurements like tbsp, tsp or even oz into the options for sour cream?

What about beans, I know that I ate 10 beans but how many cups is that? I have no idea. Or cucumber, I know I had 10 slices of cucumber – how much cups of that? or how much of a cucumber is that?

Maybe I am just being picky, but it seemed FitDay had more options when it came to adding the amounts of food you ate. Stop screaming at me to just go back to FitDay – it is not that easy… okay maybe it is – BUT I really do like SparkPeople I just wish they would fix some of the things that really piss me off.

FitDay really knows how to deal with amounts for food; for example, there are options under milk like ‘per fl oz of coffee’ and for butter ‘guideline per slice of toast’ witch are always really nice options when you don’t measure stuff out exact. I can live with out them I just WISH SparkPeople could add that it.

One thing I think is really cool is that when you search food, other members food comes up – so that is nice – especially when you are looking for more custom stuff like Heniz Ketchup… it is just unfortunate that the calories it pulls are different then the one I eat so I still have to enter a custom food (not their fault). There are also options to share your custom food with friends witch is a neat one if you and a friend eat together a lot, then only one of you need to enter in the food.

I wish SparkPeople had mass delete and edit like Fitday but I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too (especially when you are trying to lose weight.)

Anyway, I am going to keep on going with SparkPeople because I do like it, but I won’t be rushing off to delete my FitDay account anytime soon as I still log in a few times a week to get calories for food that SparkPeople is missing – or custom foods I haven’t entered yet. I guess when you spend so long using something you get too used to it – I bet if I am still using SparkPeople a year from now I will forgot I ever even wrote this.

For anyone interested you can still view my daily foods and exercise log here.